Piranesi lives in the House, and the House is his whole world. It is an endless labyrinth of grand halls and vestibules, their walls lined with thousands upon thousands of marble statues, no two alike. An ocean is imprisoned in the lower halls; tides surge up the staircases and flood whole rooms in moments, but Piranesi is never afraid, because he understands the House the way he understands himself. He keeps careful journals, catalogues the statues, fishes and gathers seaweed, and tends the bones of the dead.
Piranesi believes that only fifteen people have ever existed, and that he is the only living inhabitant apart from the Other — a well-dressed man who appears twice a week to enlist Piranesi's help in a search for A Great and Secret Knowledge. But messages start to appear that Piranesi did not write, evidence mounts of someone else moving through the halls, and the neat certainties of his journals begin to contradict one another. As he pieces the clues together, a terrible truth surfaces about who he is and how he came to the House.
Susanna Clarke's spare, hypnotic second novel — winner of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction — is a haunting meditation on solitude, memory, and wonder, told entirely from inside one of the most singular narrators in recent fiction.